GNOME Developer Kit: Daily Fresh Software

Just days old, the GNOME Developer Kit is a Linux distro that does daily builds of the GNOME source code and is targeted primarily at GNOME developers.

Zhang Sen and Og Maciel announced the release in their weblog. The Developer Kit makes daily builds from the GNOME project's Git repository. The list of fresh software packets currently encompasses about 100 programs, with a few apps such as Banshee and Rhthmbox still blacklisted from integration due to technical reasons. The Developer Kit derives from Foresight Linux.

GNOME provides the Developer Kit as an installable DVD image, VMware image for VMware Player and Virtualbox, and hard disk image for the KVM and QEMU virtualization technologies. Updates after installation are handled through the Conary packaging tool, either through PackageKit or the sumo conary updateall command.

Og Maciel emphasizes that the Developer Kit allows GNOME developers to see their newest changes running quickly and unbeaurocratically in a complete system. Alternatively, GNOME collaborators can build their own Conary packages into the kit to test their software. The Developer Kit is also appropriate for translators on localization teams.

The #foresight IRC channel on irc.freenode.net is available for joining the GNOME Developer Kit community.

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